Red Dragon Options

[Paolo]

'Red Dragon' Mission Mulled as Cheap Search for Mars Life
any opinion on this? would it really make sense adapting a manned spaceship to unmanned Mars landing? I am skeptical...

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[pospa]

We are talking about Discovery category mission, right?
It should/must be cheap.
It's nice that many of you are suggesting minirovers and tumbleweeds rolling or jumping out of Red Dragon (RD), but why not just stick to that concept NASA Ames if thinking about.
RD will stay mostly in the standard shape or configuration as it will be that time for other unmanned missions in order to keep lander price low as much as possible.
Number of external moving tool(s)/instrument(s) would be very limited just to the sampling acquisition set -> 1 m drilling suite + camera(s) on the robotic arm sticking out of standard side hatch.
Then all other lab instruments (many and heavy) can do a lot of science by analysing samples inside of the RD capsule.
Of course meteo instruments and other cameras can be deployed through top hatch together with Ultraflex solar arrays and antena(s).
And perhaps some cheap seismometric penetrator(s) could be simply ejected during EDL phase as well.

[algorimancer]

...why not just stick to that concept NASA Ames if thinking about.

Possibly because, after experiencing Pathfinder and MER in comparison to Viking and Phoenix, we've learned to appreciate the dramatic returns a rover can deliver. It need not be a very large rover. I could easily envision a pneumatic "mortar" that rapidly pops several small rovers through the hatch which could explore the local region at least out to line-of-sight (hundreds of meters to kilometers, given a tall antenna), communicating with the dragon vehicle as with Pathfinder. Really not that difficult to do.